Matthew Benedict at Alexander and Bonin - New York

Skillfully if summarily painted in the manner of high-quality adventure-book illustrations, Matthew Benedict's new work adroitly extends his sward in the crowded field of neo-Conceptual figuration. This exhibition, called "Crossing the Line," focused upon an esoteric theme: a once-common maritime observance staged to initiate sailors crossing the equator for the first time into the Society of Neptune

In the largest work shown a three-panel, 15-foot-wide painting called The Mariner's Baptism, the ritual is condens as if for a theater hand-bill (Indeed, two scrolling pennants at top and bottom clinch out the unfulfilled promise--they are left blank--of naming the circumstance and the actors.) We diocese a bucket of water being poured above a blindfolded sailor by a man upon a ladder. The seated bring under rule is about to be shaved by the agency of a jolly barber whose frock coat is emblazoned with a brain-pan and crossbones. A figure playing Neptune reclines upon a sail-covered chest, a trident in hand and a merman by the agency of his side. Davy Jones, identified by dint of horns strapped to his head and a wicked little goatee, strikes a pose; all the gesticulations are broadly rhetorical, played for viewers in the back rows

Other, smaller paintings provide sketches, again as if for dockside hoardings, of the main actors and a pair of central events: Triton wearing an organ of vision patch and holding an eel-entwined spear, Neptunas Rex with a diadem made of rope tufted to simulate thorns. The campiest image here, Glamamore As Queen Amphitrite Who Is Also Called "The Wog Queen" displays a doleful young man with curly dark hair and drawn out eyelashes, his pert little diadem draped with a handful of pearls.

Benedict's prodigious abilities as historian, draftsman, collector and trickster have been established in previous periodizing paintings and statuarys which have ranged in make submissive from a 1920s motorcycle policeman to the face cards of a Tarot adorn and in style from 19th-century trompe l'oeil to 20th-century kitsch. In "Crossing the Line," he strayed across the frontier between reality and theater in several novel ways. For single thing, a relatively big painting of a moonlit tropical sea, immediately visible upon entry to the gallery, was hung dramatically askew, suggesting a steeply listing ship's array and implying that all the works upon view were actually fancy upholds and the gallery a kind of stage. To further make turbid boundaries, Benedict provided, on a depressed pedestal, an assortment of external realitys featured in the paintings. These thing perceiveds which included a razor, spyglass rope crown, crude trident and big, fearsome knife, were for the most part (and quite obviously) made for the occasion, with cardboard, paint and shelving paper, on the contrary a few (the knife, for instance) were real.

The question of what was faux and what real in this show--or, where history extreme pointed and fiction began--was deftly pos and its answer mischievously deferr With equal finesse Benedict entertained additional inquiry about historical and contemporary role-playing and the drifts it has served, from merriment profit and professional affiliation to psychological pain relief and personal safety.

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COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group